Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Tasting Notes for My First Bière de Garde

On 5/31/15 I brewed my first attempt at a Bière de Garde. I developed the recipe you can find here by reading and researching the web and various books. Very simple first attempt. I used a yeast I hadn't used before and fermented it at cool ale temps. I think my next attempt will be with a lager yeast. After fermentation I moved it to cold storage for 6 weeks. I kept it around 38-42F for the entire time. After that I decided to keg it and see what the results were.

Appearance: Really clear, dark amber color. Nice carbonation streaming up the glass. Pours with about two fingers of a white/off white head. That settled out to a thin puck that hung around as a drank. Really tight bubbles. Really happy with the clarity. Not something I thrive on but glad to see it.

Aroma: Light caramel and toffee with just a slight hint of spice and hay. More of a dead grass, earthy thing but, it's actually really clean smelling.

Flavor: Right up front you get the caramel flavors. Not too sweet but there is a touch of underlying sweetness. It finishes with a some spice, almost cinnamon maybe? It's dry but still has a bit of residual sweet flavors like burnt sugar in there. I bet that's from the long boil. Mouthfeel is medium, medium-light. A bit of alcohol sweetness but it's not much at all. No real warmth from the alcohol present.

Overall:Although I enjoy the beer and it's a very easy drinker for an 8% beer, I want a touch more of a wild factor to it. I believe there had to be some form of brettanomyces in the Bière de Gardes of old. Keeping those beers stored as long as they did as well as using the equipment they had in the farms of the day had to introduce some form of wild yeast and/or bacteria. I'd like to introduce a bit of funk to it. Either by blending some old beer or by adding brettanomyces to the primary fermentation. I've never done a lager fermentation with brettanomyces (or a lager fermentation at that!) but I think I may experiment with that. Pitch my lager yeast and the bretta at the same time then let the beer then condition on an oak spiral from a previous mixed fermentation. I could then blend if needed or keg/bottle as is.

I'll have a good many more Bière de Garde posts. I'm becoming quite obsessed with this style as well. Thanks for reading!

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An Interview with Yvan de Baets of Brasserie De La Senne

Excerpt from the Interview of Yvan de Baets by The Beer Temple YouTube Channel

“People think you have to use those very yeasts (farmhouse or saison) for making Saison or farmhouse ales, but that’s not true. Imagine you are a farmer in the 19th century and of course you will use your yeast because it is always better. And when you get an infection which goes really too far, you take the yeast of the neighbor which is a totally different yeast, etc. Then you have dozens and dozens of Saison yeasts in the past. Depending on the way you want to make your Saison, I consider you could make Saison with easily a hundred different yeasts. That’s not a problem.”

Savoring the Saison Panel from GABF

A description of Saison by Belgian brewer Yvan de Baets of Brasserie de la Senne

“A saison must therefore be low in alcohol (in the modern — and Belgian — sense of the word in any case), around 4.5 to 6.5%. It must be highly attenuated (90 to 95% on average, if not more, as apparent attenuation) and dry. It must also be either sour or very bitter (with a bitterness obtained by the use of a massive amount of hops low in alpha acid). It shouldn’t in any case be smooth. If spices are used, it must be with the utmost moderation. A saison is not by any means a spice soup. Ideally, it should be fermented, at least partially, by wild yeasts as well as by cultured varieties. An authentic saison has a small 'wild' side, rustic, indefinable, far from the clean aspect of certain engineered beers of today. In one word, it must have extraordinary character.”